Leftists & Personal Responsibility the Ultimate Oxymoron

Classical liberalism as embraced by great thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith & Thomas Jefferson, is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics, civil liberties under the rule of law, with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom and all underpinned by freedom of speech.  At the same time, left-wing fascism is the polar opposite of classic liberalism with its basic tenet being the active suppression of free speech.

Part of the problem in today’s politics is that far too many good, honest, and well-intentioned democrats who think of themselves as liberal in the classic sense of the term unthinkingly support the Democrat Party agenda and are unaware of how they are actually supporting a leftist/fascist ideology.  Doubt that?  Ask yourself when was the last time you heard a democrat politician say abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare.’  Exacerbating the matter, many democrats are blissfully unaware of how woke ideology & the cancel culture are slowly eroding the very pillars of the society the Founders envisioned.

~ The limits of my language are the limits of my world ~

In a previous post titled Newspeak, I wrote that language is essential for developing broad concepts and abstract thinking.  And spoken language provides a set of rules to help us organize those thoughts into logical constructs.  And the words a person uses have a direct influence on his or her mind and how the individual views the world. But the influence of language doesn’t stop there because the words we choose, not only provides a framework for an individual’s thoughts, but they also affect the values and beliefs of a society itself.

Language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.  Language can also change perspectives –sometimes both subtly and insidiously; for example, at a recent Senate hearing every democrat on the committee used the term “birthday person” instead of woman.  Do you think that could have happened as recently as during the Clinton administration?  Neither do I.

~ Personal Responsibility is not in the Leftist vocabulary ~

A question that’s been asked since philosophers first began philosophizing gives us an insight into leftist ideology.  Are people inherently good or evil?  Some believe mankind is inherently good, after all, aren’t all babies born good?  I’m not a philosopher but a more accurate statement might be that babies are born innocent and are neither good nor evil, which means that good and evil must be learned concepts.  And predicated on their behavior leftists must believe that mankind is inherently good because only then they can they ascribe every evil mankind has done to forces outside the individual’s control, thus relieving the individual of personal responsibility, and let’s face it, that’s what woke ideology does, it consciously separates responsibility from behavior.

Of all the cultural issues in America, i.e., crime, racism, sexism, etc., how many times has anyone heard on CNN or read in the NY Times a reference to personal responsibility?  Murders are caused by handguns, not people, while riots & looting a justified responses to white supremacism and economic inequality.  The leftist/fascist world view is that the problems of society are never about individual behavior- it’s always the fault of society and it’s always the government’s job to remedy.

But by focusing on the gun rather than the murderer and the socio-economic environment rather than the rapist, it relieves parents from the responsibility of teaching their children what it means to be good or moral or simple people of good character.  But the real tragedy of this worldview is that millions of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe the individual is never responsible, it’s always societal ills that are the problem and that it’s never individual behavior.

During the summer of 2020 riots, how many times did you hear on CNN or read in the NY Times anything about the responsibility the rioters had to the communities they were burning?  The reason for the riots was ostensibly the arrest and unintentional homicide of George Floyd a man convicted of multiple felonies and who once held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach.  When he was arrested Floyd was high on drugs, in the process of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, and had assaulted a police officer when the police attempted to arrest him.

But no matter, a dead felon at the hands of a white police office justified a summer of rioting that left 37 innocent by-standers dead, $2,500,000,000 in property damages, and 3,000 injured police officers.  Allow me to ask, did anyone hear a word from the legacy media about behavior or personal responsibility in the matter?  No, of course not, instead what we saw was a $15 million in a Go-Fund-Me page for the felon’s family and a statue honoring the thug outside Newark, New Jersey’s City Hall.  This is leftist America!

The bottom line here folks is this type of behavior will not stop until Americans say enough.  I also believe the future of the American experiment will be dictated by the degree individual citizens accept responsibility for their behavior.

Quote of the day: “A society can survive the collapse of its economy, but not of its citizen’s morality.” – Dennis Prager